1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to garbage disposal and more particularly to an apparatus and method capable of rapidly, effectively separating pliable plastic films from garbage for collection.
2. Description of Related Art
As to garbage disposal, typically there are techniques, i.e., landfill and burning, widely used throughout the world. Many precious lands are used for landfill as more garbage is generated everyday. Underground water and soil may be polluted by buried garbage if an appropriate disposal is not done. As to burning, it can cause severe air pollution if smoke generated during burning is not well processed prior to discharge. As to generated ashes, they are buried after being generated. Hence, the problem of polluting underground water and soil still exists. Further, it is often that residents violently protest a garbage disposal site to be established in their neighborhood because they think it may degrade their living quality once established. Furthermore, the cost of disposing garbage is increased significantly as less land being available for landfill.
Resources on earth begin to deplete in recent years. Hence, more and more people are aware of the importance of resource recycling by actively cooperating with the resource recycling policy. It is desired that amount of garbage can be reduced significantly in a near future by successfully recycling resources in order to prolong a useful time of land for burying garbage and preserve limited resources on earth.
However, the typical resource recycling (i.e., garbage recycling) techniques are unsatisfactory now. For example, a satisfactory garbage classification is not possible by the typical resource recycling techniques mainly because a wide variety of different materials are contained in garbage. For example, particularly, plastic films, plastic bags, etc. are mixed with other materials in garbage. Hence, as compared with classification of other materials in garbage, a manual garbage disposal of plastic films is a more time consuming, tedious process. In addition, a wide variety of products are made of plastic materials. Also, thin plastic films, bags are often found in garbage. Preferably, thin plastic films, bags should be recycled independently. Otherwise, a lot of problems occur if thin plastic films, bags and other plastic products are mixed in garbage disposal for recycling. Unfortunately, these problems are found in the conventional garbage disposal. Hence, a need for improvement exists.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a novel apparatus and method of separating plastic films from garbage for collection by taking advantage of ductility of plastics, separation and extensibility properties of plastic films in water, and adhesion property of water to plastic films in order to overcome the above drawbacks of the prior art.